Why is the cutscene/FMV problem in Linux gaming so difficult to fix?
Why is the cutscene/FMV problem in Linux gaming so difficult to fix?
I see it a lot in visual novels, older PC games and PC ports of older non-PC games. It sounds so trivial on paper, like... just play the video? But I know it's not. Why though? Can we ever expect the problem to be fully solved? Right now it kinda seems like an uphill struggle, like by fixing cutscene playback in one game doesn't really seem to automatically fix it for other games, so it's not a situation where a convenient one size fits all solution works.
And I don't really get it, because if it's related to video codecs, there are only so many codecs out there, right? And then you also expect that there's probably just a few popular ones out there that'll be used for 99% of all cases, with a few odd outliers here and there perhaps.
In older times when in-game scenes weren't invented yet game studios often played Bink videos.
You need a licence for the codec meaning someone has to pay to play.
Wouldn't that someone be the game company, when they first made the game? I can't imagine games rely on some system library to decode bink, it must be embedded in engine. Besides, pretty sure bink can be played on vlc, so lack of free/open source decoders isn't the issue.
It's not just a FOSS issue; it's a software patent issue.
VLC doesn't attract a huge amount of attention because they don't really make any money and would just get forked if someone did try to destroy them.
However, larger distros with commercial backing (OpenSUSE springs to mind) often won't directly include potentially patent-infringing packages, so you have to get them from a quasi-third-party repo like Packman.
A lot of games rely on Windows Media Player to play videos. So that needs to be accurately reverse engineered for videos to work properly through Wine and Proton.
Support is slowly improving.And the Unity game engine supports very few video formats on Linux. So lazy native ports with MP4 videos won't work, they would probably just crash the game. Unity doesn't support MP4 on Linux.
Is there anything VLC can't play ? Why not use the same libraries ? Would it be illegal for Valve to use that?
VideoLAN (organization behind VLC) is in France, which is outside US juridiction. The methods used by VLC are authorized/legal. Software is also not patentable there. That's why it's still up after all these years. You can learn more on their site: https://www.videolan.org/legal.html
Valve, however, must obliged to US juridiction meaning they can't do the same as VLC. Software can also be patented when meeting certain technical requirements.
That's it. Thank you.
It seems to struggle with screen recordings made by gnome. Last time I did that it played the video squashed into the left half of the screen
@HoukaiAmplifier99 I see it rarely nowadays, but yes, proprietary or old/rare codecs are the heart of it.
Most recent example I can think of is the Mega Man ZX games in the Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection, which are PC ports of old NDS games. The cutscenes just show a white screen. Did manage to fix that thanks to someone's help on reddit (was related to mfplat and another component iirc), but there are also instances where that won't work (I tried to help someone fix a cutscene issue on an obscure visual novel, but I couldn't get that to work if my life depended on it).
Modern games do seem fairly safe though, like you said.
@HoukaiAmplifier99 I might have made this up, but I think I recall reading that Valve routinely licences old and weird codecs so that they can build support in Proton for some of these fringe cases.
The only time I can remember seeing it recently was in an old game off GOG called Conquest: Frontier Wars. Like others, it just showed a coloured pattern, but with that game it couldn't recover from not being able to play and would crash after.